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Thursday, 13 December 2012

Travel Diaries: A 2012 Snapshot Medley

This blog post has been building for a while... Now that it's December I feel justified in reflecting back officially on some of the opportunities I've had to travel around this year! The following are all snapshots taken while out and about... no actual modelling shots, I'm afraid, and most taken only on a phone camera, snatching moments where I could, so quality will (ahem) range...

Feel free to skip this blog post if you don't mind what I get up to in my spare time when travelling around!

First, there was Paris in March, with photographer Jeremy Howitt:

Books in trees - brilliant! (No idea why; if anyone knows, do tell.)

Dusseldorf in April:

Just running by the Rhine... Too cool.

Kunstpalast:

The avenue of weird, spindly trees I walked along about twenty thousand times a day to get anywhere. Some beautiful houses across the road, and green park on the left.

Followed by Holland - mostly Amsterdam:

Pretty train murals (a unicorn! And a German girl I hung out with briefly):

Pulling the bicycles out of the canals... this caused quite a stir!

Tulip museum!

A little courtyard a friendly local stopped me to tell me to go and look at. So I did:

Gorgeous cafe stop in De Negen Straatjes:

A mini medley from some of the excellent art galleries I visited in Amsterdam:

My favourite; the bright white and light just pings out of it!:

A hilariously girly hostel I stayed at for some of my time in Amsterdam - only girls are allowed to stay there! So obviously they installed a hello kitty toilet seat and the Sex and the City film was on in the lounge when I arrived to check in.

Classic windmill scene, courtesy of a photographer who de-toured me there en route to a shoot, and to see the AMAZING tulip fields, below:

Flower market!

The most brilliant museum; Katten Kabinet, celebrating the depiction of cats in art and culture! There was a cat fast asleep on the reception desk, content and adored (largely by me):

(Those tulips I was banging on about...)

Swans on the canal at night!

Wonderful Edinburgh and Fife in May:

I met up with Roswell Ivory, once we discovered we were both in Edinburgh at the same time, and this is her snapshot of us gathering things to try on when shopping! Yes, I bought that disgustingly fluorescent dip-dye handkerchief hemmed sundress, and it is brilliant. Flower garlands galore, too!

I found this couple having sex in the middle of the road one evening. They were pretty pleased with themselves. I am proud to say I did my best to pull them out of immediate danger. (Earlier that night the boy had bashfully told me he couldn't possibly express his feelings for me because he hadn't felt that way about anyone before, etc., and later that night he forgot the girl's name. I tried to give him an education about respecting women (and himself)... I do what I can... Vegas, eh? Jamie, if you're reading this, BE GOOD.)

Fancy Dress Shopping!

Getty Museum (much needed after Vegas):

Et voila! You have made it through an insanely long blog post. I'm glad I got it out of my system! Congratulations, and I hope you enjoyed the tour!

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A print book is now available for purchase, thanks to the kindness and generosity of the artists involved! If you agree that physical prints are far better to look at than online, virtual ones, do read all about it. Each purchase includes a donation to Amnesty. Treat yourself! Thank you.

Please email me directly at ellarosemuse@live.co.uk with any enquiries, to make a booking or if you'd like me to get in touch when travelling to your area.

Visitors since 13th July 2010

Bouguereau, 'Evening Mood'

Velasquez - The Rokeby Venus

J. W. Waterhouse, 'The Lady of Shalott'

Rossetti, 'Venus Verticordia'

John Grimshaw, 'Iris'

J. W. Waterhouse, 'My Sweet Rose'

Guerin, 'L'aurore et Cephale'

Botticelli, 'The Birth of Venus'

J. W. Waterhouse, 'Psyche Opening the Golden Box'

Pamela Hanson, 'Bis'

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,by a mystic golden light.My head soaked in river water.I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They calleda horse out of the woodland."Take her there, through the desert shores."They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.The banquet for the shadows.Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.Came upon the headdress.It was gilded, dark and golden.The children sang.I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my handsmells like the feel of an old school desk,the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scentmy armpits sound a bass note strongas the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharpas the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the napeof my neck, just where you might bendyour head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleetof tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.